ATI Reportedly Boosting Orders to Chip Manufacturers

ATI, graphics products group of Advanced Micro Devices, has reportedly boosted its orders to manufacturers of its graphics processors, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and United Microelectronics Corp. The increase of orders may mean that the company anticipates rising demand of graphics cards or may indicate that AMD does not have a lot of products left in stock.

ATI ordered less than 2 thousand wafers to TSMC and UMC back in January and February, but doubled volume to 4-5 thousand wafers in March, according to a report from Commercial Times news-paper (the article was partly translated by DigiTimes web-site). However, AMD is expected to place orders for 8-9 thousand wafers at TSMC and UMC in April and 10 thousands in May.

According to Jon Peddie Research, 15.2 million discrete graphics cards powered by graphics processing units from ATI or Nvidia Corp. were shipped in Q4 2008, representing a 42.7% decline (year-over-year), accounting for $2.5 billion in revenue, reflecting a similar 43.8% decline in revenue. As a result, it is not surprising that both AMD and Nvidia dramatically lowered orders to TSMC and TSMC early this year.

It is not clear whether AMD substantially increased production volumes because it is about to roll-out new graphics cards – ATI Radeon HD 4700-series and ATI Radeon HD 4890 – powered by code-named of RV740 and RV790 chips or because it is about to run out of graphics chips and core-logic sets or because the company expects the rise of demand towards graphics cards.